United Airlines Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the United Airlines Holdings earnings conference call for the second quarter of 2019. My name is Brandon and I'll be your conference facilitator today. Following the initial remarks from management, we will open the lines for questions. At that time, if you have a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypads. This call is being recorded and is copyrighted. Please note that no portion of the call may be recorded, transcribed, or rebroadcast without the company's permission. Your participation implies your consent to our recording of this call. If you do not agree with these terms, simply drop off the line. I will now turn the presentation over to your host for today's call, Michael Eskinen, Vice President of Corporate Development and Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Brandon. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to United's second quarter 2019 earnings conference call. Yesterday, we issued our earnings release and separate investor update. Additionally, this morning, we issued a presentation to accompany this call. All three of those documents are available on our website at ir.united.com. Information yesterday's release and investor update, the accompanying presentation and the remarks made during this conference call may contain forward-looking statements which represent the company's current expectations or beliefs concerning future events and financial performance. All forward-looking statements are based upon information currently available to the company. A number of factors could cause actual results to differ materially from our current expectations. Please refer to our earnings release, Form 10-K, and other reports filed with the SEC by United Airlines Holdings and United Airlines for a more thorough description of these factors. Also, during the course of our call, we will discuss several non-GAAP financial measures. For a reconciliation of those non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, please refer to the tables at the end of our earnings release, investor update, and presentation, copies of which are available on our website. Joining us here in Chicago to discuss our results and outlook are Chief Executive Officer Oscar Munoz, President Scott Kirby, Executive Vice President of Human Resources and Labor Relations Kate Jibo, Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer Andrew Nacella, and Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer Jerry Laderman. In addition, we have other members of the team in the room available to assist with Q&A. And now I'd like to turn the call over to Oscar.

Thank you, Mike, and my thanks to all of you for joining us today. We're very excited to highlight yet another successful quarter for United Airlines. And if I could, let me start with a couple of headlines. Thanks to the hard work of United's team, we delivered a third consecutive quarter of strong, adjusted pre-tax margin growth, improving 200 basis points this quarter and accelerating us on our trajectory towards meeting our 2020 adjusted EPS goal. On the operational front... Well, as you know, and obviously we are an outdoor sport, and tough weather at our hubs is nothing new, but weather, combined with issues related to Pakistan and Iranian airspace, as well as the 737 MAX grounding, still didn't knock us off our game. We continued to deliver top-tier operational performance with strong D0 results across the system, and we were the top performer at Chicago Air, Denver, Los Angeles, San Francisco, versus our large hub competitors in those markets. Moving on to another question that comes up, and in respect to the mass aircraft, our number one priority continues to be safety for both our customers and our employees. I want to commend our team for their work in rebooking customers who are impacted by the grounding in the most efficient, timely, and caring way possible. And we will continue to make sure that our customers get taken care of. Finally, we continue to introduce great improvements to the United experience, allowing us to better serve our customers every time they travel and making them want to choose United in the future. We turn to slide four. Our performance and financial results in the second quarter have further increased our confidence that we can work through and deliver results even as we face multiple speed bumps. Second quarter, adjusted pre-tax earnings were $1.4 billion, with an adjusted pre-tax margin of 12.4%, another quarter of 200 basis points in margin expansion year over year. And today, we are raising the midpoint of our full year 2019 adjusted EPS guidance with a new range of $10.50 to $12. This raise is our proof-not-promises mentality at work, a powerful demonstration that we expect to consistently deliver on our commitments. We said we would continue to execute on our multi-year network strategy, flying when and where our customers want to travel. This quarter alone, we launched 34 new domestic and international routes, including headline-catching international destinations that no other U.S. carrier offers, like Washington Dulles to Tel Aviv, Denver to Frankfurt, Newark to both Prague and Naples, and soon we'll be adding four additional routes to Tokyo Haneda. We said we would become the most customer-carrying airline in the industry and deliver the most exciting series of improvements to the flying experience. Scott, Kate, and Andrew will touch on that in a moment and provide examples of ways we go above and beyond to be the airline that customers not only choose to fly, but love to fly. And as we look toward the future, we believe more than ever that no matter what challenges arise, United has put itself in the best position to succeed. So with that, thank you, and I'll turn it over to Scott.